The Starbound trilogy, Book 1 Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner Disney-Hyperion Fiction, YA Romance/Sci-Fi Themes: Cross-Genre, Space Stories, Wilderness Tales ****
Description
Lowborn soldier Tarver Merendsen became a war hero fighting rebel colonists, but still knows his place: far below the rest of the passengers aboard the
hyperspace luxury liner Icarus. Not that he wants anything to do with the snobby elites, playing their frivolous little games and having endless
parties while colony worlds struggle and soldiers die... until he sees her. Unlike the others, she looks him right in the eye, and doesn't talk down to him
or see him as a charming novelty. But then he finds out who she is. Despite what his heart might say, he knows he has no chance, nor does he want one, not
with the daughter of the legendary magnate Roderick LaRoux.
Lilac, sole daughter of perhaps the wealthiest man in the galaxy, lives in a gilded prison. Despite the money and the silk ball gowns and the prestige,
anyone she gets close to must be of proper social standing - and nobody's standing is high enough for a LaRoux. "We only have each other," Father often
tells her, and seems determined to keep it that way for her entire life, grooming her not so much to inherit his role as to be a pampered ornament. She
didn't mean to engage the stranger in conversation, but something about the unpolished young man intrigued her, even if she knows she can never hope to see
him again. Not unless she wants to risk him vanishing as other boys and men have who got too close to Roderick LaRoux's precious little girl.
Then the unthinkable happens: the hyperdrives fail, and the Icarus crashes with all hands... save two, who made it to the only escape pod to clear
the wreckage. None other than Tarver and Lilac.
A battle-hardened soldier and a socialite, alone in the wilderness... at first, it's all they can do to keep from killing each other. But there's something
much stranger going on than they first realize. For one thing, hyperdrives don't just fail. For another, though the world appears to have been terraformed,
there are no sign of inhabitants, and nobody would go to that much trouble just to walk away from a planet. The longer they stay, the more they realize
something's very wrong - something that destroyed whoever first colonized this world and the Icarus, and may well destroy them before they can be
rescued.
Review
This book had many positive reviews and a decent premise, so I went into it with high hopes. At first, those hopes were met with disappointment. Dated ideas
(particularly the idea of fathers owning daughters and their "virtue," though not said in so many words) and other oddly anachronistic details keep the galactic
civilization the authors create from feeling too futuristic, and the characters initially come across as little more than stock young adult romance leads: him
the nuts-and-bolts, no-nonsense soldier with dirt under the nails, her the silk-and-ribbons society girl who far outranks him socially but seems largely
helpless practically. Both prove more than a little slow to learn, with multiple backslides. As I read on, the characters slowly took on some more depth, even
if their situation (and the general storyline of opposites attracting amid hardship) brought few surprises (and more than one near eyeroll.) Yet I kept turning
pages; if it wasn't spectacular, it was readable, at least. But somehow, imperceptibly, These Broken Stars develops some true depth and originality,
taking a few surprising twists on the way to an ending that redeems much (if not quite all) of the earlier flatness. In the end, that strong finale lifted the
tale to four stars in the ratings, which may not match many of the glowing reviews I'd read elsewhere but still makes for a respectable showing.
The planet Avon is a world of swamps and gray skies, a mire in more ways than one. For decades, the terraforming project that was supposed to transform
it into a garden has inexplicably stalled out - leading to frustration and all-out rebellion. The more the military clamps down to keep the peace, the more
rebels slip away into the uncharted swamps, where technology is useless and "will of the wisp" lights are rumored to lead trespassers to their doom. Despite
a temporary ceasefire, tensions have never been higher, and it will only take one incident to send the whole colony sky-high.
Captain Jubilee "Lee" Chase is a legend among her peers. She, alone of all soldiers stationed on Avon, seems immune to the madness known as the Fury, which
drives soldiers to fits of homicidal rage (and which has not helped relations with the locals, who seem immune.) Perhaps it is because she doesn't dream; her
dreams died with her parents in the violence on the planet Verona. Then she is taken hostage by a young rebel, a boy babbling about hidden bases in the swamps
and other insanity... but is he mad, or is there more to the Avon colony than she's been told?
Flynn Cormac's older sister was executed as a rebel when he was eight years old, and he's been on the run ever since. He's been trying to use his status among
the Fianna rebel army to end the hostilities and find a path toward peace, maybe even find out why the terraforming has gone wrong, but it's hard to convince a
people who have been kicked as hard and often as the Avon colonists to put down their guns, and he knows he's losing ground. He didn't actually intend to abduct
the famed Captain Lee Chase when he snuck into the bar on the base, but he was desperate for answers about what he's seen in the swamp: a base where there
should not be one, pointing to a presence even the army is unaware of - or a plot that will end the colony.
Lee and Flynn were sworn enemies on sight... so how can they be falling for each other? And how will either survive what they discover when they dig deeper into
Flynn's hidden base?
Review
The first Starbound book took a while to hook me. This one did not have that problem. It moves from the first few pages, creating a world less
reliant on anachronistic tropes (save how it clearly and admittedly patterns itself on the Irish "Troubles", where occupation by a foreign power breeds
generational resentment and entrenches violence and mistrust as a way of life.) Lee is a soldier's soldier, convinced she's on the right side and that she'll
live and die in the uniform, while Flynn is equally committed to the cause of the Avon colonists, even if he tries to avoid open violence after what happened to
his sister. It is not a fast or easy fall into love for either of them (no spoilers there; this is a romance, after all), with setbacks and misunderstandings
and outside interference, not to mention betrayals and outbursts of violence. The peripheral characters aren't quite as shallow as they might seem at first (save
one or two), each having a little more depth and justification to their actions than one might expect. The story could almost be a standalone, but as the plot
progresses it ties into events in These Broken Stars, becoming part of the greater arc. Things build to a decently cathartic climax, with some threads
left over for the third and final volume. Sometimes the emotions and angst get a little over the top, and one of the revelations at the end was borderline
eye-rolling, but otherwise I enjoyed this story, and am looking forward to the final installment (which is in the To Be Read pile.)
A year ago, the infamous Avon Broadcast broke the news that galactic megacorporation LaRoux Industries was conducting monstrous, inhumane experiments through
the enslavement of hyperspace alien entities known as the "whispers", not just on the backwater planet Avon but everywhere. With them, Roderick LaRoux can turn
any human into a mindless slave, making average people into cold-blooded mass murderers. Yet nobody listens - well, almost nobody...
Sophia grew up on Avon, one of the oppressed colonist natives who witness firsthand the horrors of LaRoux's meddling: in the blink of an eye, it turned her
loving father into a mindless suicide bomber. Thus begin a single-minded pursuit, through a series of petty cons and stolen identities, all to make the man
responsible, tycoon Roderick LaRoux, pay. She might have succeeded by now had she not somehow picked up a shadow, the notorious hacker known as the Knave of
Hearts, who seems to have made it a personal project to chase her out of every haven she finds.
Gideon has his own bone to pick with the LaRoux family: his brother, Simon, was a childhood playmate of Roderick's pampered daughter Lilac - only to be sent off
on a suicide mission when he developed feelings for her. He developed his online persona, the Knave of Hearts, to uncover the truth behind LaRoux Industries and
expose Roderick and Lilac for the heartless monsters they are. When the Avon Broadcast went out, he listened - and now, he's hunting down a rogue commander who
enabled Roderick's atrocities on that world.
When Sofia and Gideon meet at a LaRoux gala, they find themselves thrown together when their covers are about to be blown... and witness a horror beyond either
of their reckoning. For Roderick LaRoux is on the verge of literal galactic conquest - and only one con girl and one hacker stand in his way.
Review
I didn't expect to enjoy the first book in the series, but it won me over. Likewise, the second book, while composed of some rather familiar parts (and set in
a future that still felt a little too contemporary in many ways), was decent. So I came to this volume with high hopes - hopes, unfortunately, that were dashed by
the end.
At first, Their Fractured Light starts off on the right note. Taking up about a year after the end of the previous volume, it doesn't spend too much time
rehashing as it plunges into the story. Being a romance, of course, there are sparks from the start, and the only real question is when, not if, they recognize
their mutual attraction. (Being a young adult romance, there's also an extra dollop of angst surrounding their feelings, exacerbated by both being so enmeshed in
their own lies that true feelings hardly stand a chance of taking root.) There's action, there's tension, there's back-and-forth banter, there's betrayal, while
over it all looms the specter of Roderick LaRoux as the untouchable supervillain. So far, so good. But then the story brings back the couples from the previous
books, and Gideon and Sofia's tale gets overwhelmed. Tarver and Lilac in particular come to dominate the story, especially when Lilac's previous encounters with
the whispers makes her central to the unfolding plot - a plot which may have gone beyond even Roderick's ability to control. And here is where the book really
starts nose-diving, as it becomes a jumble of too many characters and too much action, in which the ostensible stars are just two more game pieces on the board. The
angst ramps up to 11, and the plot goes from interesting to contrived. (I can't get into specifics without spoilers, but I'll just say that the retroactive
revelation that some "choices" weren't conscious choices at all... it really robbed the story and the characters.) Then the final stretch decides to turn the entire
arc into a Lesson about faith.
Yes, faith.
The whole trilogy, the galaxy-spanning struggle of six young adults against the machinations of one monstrous man, the astonishing revelation that humanity is not
alone... all of it was just a framework for a lesson about faith. I honestly just stared at the pages when I realized this, completely kicked out of the story as
my jaw dropped. And then it ends, in a way that feels especially contrived and (skirting spoilers) pulled its punch when it came to one of the key elements driving
the entire plot. It also somehow avoided directly confronting how so much of this misery was created by one man's determination that he owned his little girl, like
a doll to be played with and kept on the shelf. Ultimately, what had been an unexpectedly intersting melding of young adult romance, science fiction, and
action utterly disintegrates by the final chapters, drowned in a treacle-soaked Lesson.
